Reading My Reminiscences by Tagore for the first time and it transports me back to my childhood when my mother read this book to me on summer afternoons. She may have planned to read a only so many pages before I ready to nap but these readings never went by her plans. I always begged for another page, just a bit longer and so nap time was greatly abbreviated. I hold those memories dear to this day.
His comparison of his own childhood to those of more modern children holds true even today across a similar generational divide:
Our elders were in every way at a great distance from us, in their dress and food, living and doing, conversation and amusement. We caught glimpses of these, but they were beyond our reach. Elders have become cheap to modern children; they are too readily accessible, and so are all objects of desire. Nothing ever came so easily to us. Many a trivial thing was for us a rarity, and we lived mostly in the hope of attaining, when we were old enough, the things which the distant future held in trust for us. The result was that what little we did get we enjoyed to the utmost; from skin to core nothing was thrown away. The modern child of a well-to-do family nibbles at only half the things he gets; the greater part of his world is wasted on him.
We have snow-plow and helicopter parents now that kids are being smothered by affection, attention and solicitousness. They would love nothing more than to break free from that non-stop enmeshment and breathe free. A generation prior, there were more kids to be managed per family and parents had way less help by way of services or automation to get done what they needed to in order to feed and care for the family. That put some distance between parent and child and perhaps stimulated the same desire among the youngsters to enter the adult world that they could only observe from the periphery.
Comments